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  • I don't get it. In the paper it sounds like it's "just" a CRUD DB, then you have some fleet of Macs, and they store inputs and outputs in S3. What's the innovation here? Not trying to poo on this, but it looked like the most basic and obvious approach.
    by brandonpelfrey
  • It would be so incredibly cool if we finally had an accessible consumer-accessible way to turn a network of computers on a network into a supercomputer. A household has a child who gets into 3D artwork and wants to render something? People can opt their tablets, phones, laptops, whatever to crunch out some frames overnight while not being used.
    by lynndotpy
  • We did a little demo/have a patent for a similar idea using idle GPUs on Mercedes vehicles once upon a time - https://patents.google.com/patent/US20230281046A1/en
    by buildbot
  • My warm take is that Apple is leaving a lot of money on the table by not investing in creating an independent supply chain for their chips and building their own cloud. They arguably had the first mover advantage when it came to general purpose arm compute; all they had to do was flood the market and make it easy for anyone to rent it. Not only would they corner a part of the market but perhaps ease demand pressure on other chip manufacturers too.
    by pm90
  • I guess for companies this can be nice? Run some inference in the off-hours on the machines that you already have. Could be useful for analytical tasks that don't require to be instant. On the technical side this doesn't seem that groundbreaking for me though.
    by tom1337
  • As with all similar SETI@home approaches, this paper does not address the energy cost.

    Yes, we can distribute tasks to idle machines in homes and on office desktops, but it is often much more expensive than sending it to a data center where power is cheaper and the hardware is more efficient.

    by mcculley
  • Pardon me not understanding what this is about?

    Basically SETI for AI workloads? At least, this is the impression the landingpage left me with.

    I am a bit lost, tbh.

    by sdoering
  • If you've been around Macs long enough this is very much in Apple's wheelhouse. They already do something similar with Final Cut Pro rendering, Logic Pro, Grand Central Dispatch, and XCode distributed CI/CD. Apple HQ is probably sitting on 1000s of nodes, high powered MBPs, iMacs, that could do lots of inference work overnight.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch

    [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/dispatch

    by yardie

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